Mitch McConnell walks narrow line after cliff deal

Jan. 13, 2013

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Just weeks after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell worked with Vice President Joe Biden on an eleventh-hour deal to avoid $1.3 trillion in budget cuts that threatened to wreck the economy, political experts say the Kentucky Republican, facing re-election next year, may have strengthened his position.

His role in the deal didn’t help him among tea party members because it raises taxes without addressing spending and the national debt. “We weren’t happy with what came out of that,” said Sarah Durand, president of the Louisville Tea Party. “Republicans had one card in their hand and they folded and gave it up for nothing.”

But the experts say McConnell appears to have minimized such political damage by quickly criticizing the very deal he’d helped reach, and digging in against further tax increases.

The deal also returned McConnell to the national spotlight, after weeks of House Speaker John Boehner taking the lead in White House negotiations.

“He’s compromised in the spirit of the great legislative leaders of the past,” said Stephen Voss, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky.

And while “that increases the odds he’d face a primary challenge” among more conservative Republicans, “it gives him a much better portfolio going into the general election once he’s done with the primary,” said Voss. “My gut says he played it right.”

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, agreed, noting that McConnell’s actions are unlikely to elicit more wrath from members of the tea party than he was already set to receive — and will probably help him when he goes before more moderate voters in the general election.

“McConnell and Biden were the only two winners from that whole miserable episode,” Sabato said.

Democratic political consultant Danny Briscoe noted that, “at this moment, there’s not a legitimate challenger in either party to him.”

But that’s not to say that McConnell won’t have opposition from both the right and the left.

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Already, the conservative group foramerica.org is running Internet ads that show McConnell flanked by Biden and President Barack Obama, and asking, “Mitch McConnell: Whose side are you on?”

“I think that there is a tenuous relationship between Senator McConnell and the tea party because most of his career he has been a conservative Republican, but he’s not a tea party Republican,” said Briscoe, among those who believe McConnell could face a primary challenge. McConnell has never had a serious primary challenge in 28 years in the Senate.

So far, only Owensboro Democrat Ed Marksberry, who lost to U.S. Rep. Brett Guthrie in a 2nd District congressional race in 2010, has said he will run.

But others, including actress Ashley Judd, are said to be considering a challenge.

And a liberal-leaning anti-McConnell group in Kentucky, Progress Kentucky, put petitions on its website last week encouraging numerous Democrats, Republicans and an independent to run against McConnell.

So far, McConnell’s decision to work with the Obama administration on the fiscal cliff has yet to elicit any murmurs about a primary challenge from the tea party.

But David Adams, a Central Kentucky tea party leader, said he expects someone from the group will mount a primary challenge. McConnell’s actions during negotiations involving the debt ceiling and fiscal cliff during the next few months may determine whether he faces a real threat from the right.

The tea party, made up largely of uncompromising fiscal conservatives, is already uncomfortable with McConnell’s past positions on government borrowing and spending and has long believed he was part of the problem that got the country $17 trillion in debt.

“There is not a straw that broke the camel’s back,” Adams said. “It’s just going back a long time, him continuing to support excessive growth of government and voting for really bad budgets that made things so much worse.”

Durand, however, said that she’s not certain she wants a tea party candidate to challenge McConnell and that tea party groups should be very selective if they decide to endorse someone over him. Choosing the wrong candidate, she warned, could help a Democrat win the seat.

Durand said she has received calls from Democratic organizations offering to help bankroll a tea party candidate.

“They are salivating at the possibility of us running someone like Todd Akin (of Missouri) or Richard Mourdock (of Indiana),” she said. Akin and Mourdock were tea party candidates who lost general election races they were expected to win.

Republican political consultant Ted Jackson, however, said he doesn’t believe McConnell can be beat in a primary.